Life's hard lessons learned on mountaintop of death / After rugby team's plane crashed in Andes, everyone had to contribute -- even the dead

Torri Minton, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published
4:00 am PDT, Sunday, July 8, 2001

The plane was flying over the Andes when huge black rocks suddenly appeared out the left window. Then, a metallic sound as the aircraft scraped the mountain.

The fuselage ripped open like flesh before a scalpel. Everything went very white and very cold.

The charter plane carrying 45 people, including Nando Parrado, his mother, sister and members of his Uruguayan rugby team, split apart.

The front section floated briefly, then slid like a toboggan onto a snowy peak, 11,500 feet up. For 13 of the passengers, the crash meant instant death; for the others, it was the beginning of 72 days of frozen hell.

In the years that followed his rescue, Parrado became incredibly successful,

founding two television stations, running six companies, winning many awards for motorcycle and stock car racing.

Parrado took the lessons he learned on that frozen mountain nearly 30 years ago and transferred them to the workplace, so successfully that he was selected as the keynote speaker at the recent convention of the Society for Human Resource Management in San Francisco.

His main message may shock driven American workers: Love, not workaholism, is the key to survival.

Parrado's story is interwoven with lessons about leadership, decision- making, teamwork, faith and the importance of friendship.

In October 1972, Parrado, then 19, was flying to Santiago, Chile, with his rugby teammates. It was a Friday, the 13th day of the month, perhaps the unluckiest day ever for those aboard the plane. Yet what came after the crash was an incredible tale of survival, made into the film "Alive," starring Ethan Hawke as Parrado, a reluctant leader.

During that first night on the mountain, teamwork, common sense and quick decision-making saved the survivors' lives, Parrado said. Realizing they would die of exposure unless they plugged a gaping hole in what was left of the plane, they made a wall of suitcases and airplane seats to keep out the worst of the elements.

Experts later were surprised that anyone survived more than 48 hours on the mountain, where nighttime temperatures dipped to 40 below zero.

Despite the passengers' efforts, some did die by the next morning, including Parrado's mother. A week later, his sister died in his arms.

At that point, Parrado made a decision that would save the lives of 16 people. "I would do anything possible to get back to my father, to tell him, ÔI'm alive,' " he said.

He closed off his emotions, allowing not one tear to fall the entire time, because that would mean losing salt.

"I turned myself into a surviving machine," Parrado said. "I said ÔI'll get out of here or I'll die trying.' "

By the 10th day, the men heard on a small transistor radio that the search for them had been called off. After that, the group's first leader was too depressed to lead anymore.

And they were starving. All the food they had for 29 people was two chocolate bars, one bottle of wine and a half-box of chocolate-covered peanuts.

"We tried to eat some shoes and suitcases," Parrado said.

Two new leaders emerged. As in many workplaces, they were reluctant. But they had the necessary skills. They were medical students who advised the group that, if they were to live, they would have to eat.

The group, all Catholics, had to make a decision.

They could refuse to eat, and therefore die.

They could commit suicide.

Or they could commit cannibalism.

"To survive, we would have to eat the dead bodies of our friends," Parrado said.

The survivors worked together, he said, forming a bond so strong that each one gave the others permission to eat their flesh if they died.

Like in a workplace that functions well, everyone had a purpose and contributed to the survival of the group. One teammate, for example, invented a kind of sunglasses, fashioned from materials in the cockpit and elastics used to secure magazines. Without those, Parrado said, they would have gone blind from the high-altitude glare.

The group had survived for 2Ç weeks when an avalanche buried them as they huddled in the plane in the middle of the night. Nine more died; the rest took three days to dig through 15 feet of snow piled above the fuselage.

But, Parrado said, from that emotional low came life. They had nine more bodies to provide food.

By then, Parrado knew someone had to trek across the Andes to Chile. His teammates called it a "kamikaze expedition."

Parrado and Roberto Canessa thought the trip might take two days. Ten days later and near death, they reached a crevasse with a river at the bottom. On the other side was a shepherd, who threw them paper wrapped around a rock.

Parrado wrote: "I come from a plane that fell in the mountains. I am Uruguayan. We have been walking for 10 days. I have a friend up there who is injured. In the plane there are still 14 injured people. We have to get out of here quickly and we don't know how. We don't have any food. We are weak. When are you going to come and fetch us? We can't even walk. Where are we?"

In two days, helicopters rescued everyone.

The human resources convention responded to Parrado's story with tears and a standing ovation. Hundreds stood in line for hours at Moscone Center, waiting for him to autograph "Alive," the book about the ordeal.